In interactive multi-modal data fusion systems, data, requests and commands are received and processed from a variety of input modalities including speech, text and graphics. The multi-modal data, requests and commands are combined and acted upon by a dialog manager. Known interactive multi-modal data fusion systems have a static wait period (for example 4 seconds) to combine multi-modal data, requests and commands and send to the dialogue manager. In such multi-modal systems, the system waits to receive a first data packet, request or command from the user after the generation of a system response. Once the first data packet, request or command has been received from a modality, the data fusion system waits for the static time period to receive further data packet, request or command from other modalities. After the end of the static time period all the data packet, request or command received during that period are fused together using different methods, such as unification, agglomeration or otherwise.
This static wait period can provide an observable delay and erroneous responses may be provided by the dialog manager as this period may be too short for specific users or for complex requests and commands. Furthermore, the static waiting period may be too long for certain input modalities for example touch input but too short for others for instance speech input.
In this specification, including the claims, the terms ‘comprises’, ‘comprising’ or similar terms are intended to mean a non-exclusive inclusion, such that a method or apparatus that comprises a list of elements does not include those elements solely, but may well include other elements not listed.